Tuesday, September 21, 2010

I'm 14 weeks into my 22 week marathon training plan so I decided to add up the miles to see how far I've come. My 10 miler training plan from earlier this year grossed a whopping 113.2 miles in 9 weeks so I assumed I was pretty close to the same mileage. Boy was I wrong! I'm currently sitting at 297.15 miles! I have 342.3 to go this marathon training season... I feel so tired all of a sudden, lol.

With training kind of sucking due to pain lately, I've been looking to the internet for inspiration. I saw this video on my knitting forums earlier today and wanted to link it to my blog so I would be able to come back to it the next time training gets tough.

The comments on this video suggest that there are many out there who turn to running as the result of poor health and weight. My own story is similar. I started trying to lose weight in the fall of 2007, when I hit my highest weight of 225 lbs. I was morbidly obese, unhealthy and unhappy. Over the following two years, I restricted my calories and was able to lose 25 lbs. However, I discovered that diet alone was not going to fix my problems. I started running in the fall of 2009, with a friend from work (who is now my training buddy!). It was definitely not easy. I was quickly sidelined with a knee injury (probably resulting from the stress of running 50 lbs overweight) but stuck with it. In less than a year, I've gone from a 43 minute to a 30 minute 5k. I've gone from watching people run half marathons as a spectator to completing a half marathon. And my health is in the best condition that its been since high school.

It occurred to me that, since I'm less than a week from my first half marathon, I should probably memorialize all of the effort that has gone into my training plan in blog form. I'm on week 14 of my 22 week marathon training plan, and am just now starting to feel the aches and pains that accompany running 30+ miles a week. I just keep reminding myself of all of the effort that I have already put in to getting back into shape and being able to run a minimum of 13.1 miles without being winded or exhausted and hope it will pull me through the rest of this season's training.